The Parade
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day one hundred and fifty-nine: Standing behind that curtain, waiting to sing, Rachel considers her Glee history.


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a second cycle, and then a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh cycle. Now here's cycle 8!_

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**"The Parade"  
Rachel**

She could hear the audience out there, but it was just a hum now, a drone, and in that moment she would pay no attention to it. She was breathing as regularly as she could, even if she could feel all her nerves on edge.

This was it, everything they'd been working on for all these months, all they'd worked toward. All the sacrifices they'd made, holding on to the belief that they could make it to this moment… they'd been so close to losing all of it for a moment, when they'd discovered their set list had been passed around and torn apart. They'd almost thrown the towel in…

But now not only had they pulled through, they'd put it on her to get them started with a bang. She'd never been as nervous as that moment. She swore she could see the last few months flashing before her eyes.

No one would take them seriously at first… to an extent, neither did she. It was hard to be confident with just the five of them, struggling. But she kept as positive as she could, and soon that positivity was rewarded with Finn. Suddenly they could afford to be a little more confident about their chances, but they still had ways to go.

It was hard to accept that this way would be advanced because Quinn and a couple other Cheerios had joined their ranks, for… whatever reason they had. She didn't trust that it could be for any good reason other than to ruin the one good thing she had going for her. It took her a while to see them as being people she could trust, but in the end it was all about the gift that they shared. Even if they hadn't started that way, she could see they genuinely wanted to be there now.

The same could be said of Puck and the guys, in a way. They were a surprise, a good one, really. She didn't know Mike and Matt at all, except from the day to day of school. And Puck, well… he was the face on the other side of the-arm-that-slushied, but beyond that… they had really come through though. They could truly say, they would not have made it there without them, not just for the sake of meeting the number requirements.

She knew they could win. She'd known from the night of invitationals, the first time they'd all performed together. For the first time, they were a club, a real club. They weren't rejects of cheerleaders or jocks, they were twelve kids in blue, entertaining the masses.

It wasn't as though they hadn't run into obstacles, now that they had become a group. Most of those obstacles seemed to be stamped 'Sue Sylvester.' She wished she knew what it was they'd done to incur her wrath so much. Yes, they had a couple of her cheerleaders, but even before they'd joined…

There'd been the photocopy machine, the 'Push it'… thing… But then the first real Sylvester interference that threatened them could come down to two words: Sue's Kids. They'd been torn in half, and then more had been taken, until they were nine against three, and Rachel did not like it… not one bit.

But they'd all come back together in the end, in part to support Quinn as her secret was let out. They had come together, rallied around her… more than once they had reaffirmed their bond with means to show they were there for Quinn, and Finn, and the baby… They owed a lot to it, she had to imagine. It was not the ideal way to go about things, but they couldn't deny it had brought them closer together, and if there was one thing that was for certain, it was that they needed that closeness.

They needed it, because without it they could lose their way. There had been temptation put out there for them to change, to resort to show tricks like Hairography. There was the yearbook, the dreaded co-captain position… but then she had gotten them on to the mattress store commercial. And sure, it hadn't exactly ended up for the best, but it didn't change that they'd come together and created something all on their own, as a group.

In the end it had cost them Mr. Schuester. And to add to their problems, on the verge of Sectionals, she'd gone and opened up the horrible can of worms, the secrets about Quinn and the baby… it didn't seem right that it should all happen, when they were getting so close…

So if she was going to step in and do this song, she'd make up for her mistakes, she'd show that audience that McKinley, and New Directions… they were fighters. It didn't matter what they threw at them. It would bounce off, they would prevail.

She breathed out, grasping the edges of the curtains to pull them open and push through… no one was going to rain on her parade.

THE END


End file.
